Courageous Collaboration

Courageous Collaboration for Greater Impact

It’s courage that sets theMetropolitan Alliance of Connected Communities (MACC)apart and defines our collaboration story. Bold and forward thinking has been the foundation of who we are as a membership organization since the very beginning. This bold and courageous collaboration allows us to achieve greater equity for the individuals, families and communities we collectively serve.

Here are just a few examples of how we as MACC members are courageously collaborating for greater impact.

Advancing Social Enterprise

How can social enterprise build economic opportunity in our community? This was the question leaders from our member organizations challenged us to explore.

This past year, based on member input and a $500,000 grant from the Northwest Area Foundation, we created a Social Enterprise Development Network (SEDN). The SEDN pulls together expertise, resources, and technical assistance to help our members take their social enterprise ventures and ideas to the next level.

The SEDN will build partnerships with our member organizations and outside partners and the community; inspire new ideas through thought leadership, provide technical assistance and capacity building, and develop common language and tools to focus our members’ work on social enterprise.

We meet members where they are in their social enterprise journey to provide innovative solutions to help them achieve success.

Delivering Shared Services

For nearly a decade, our administrative services shared service model has delivered the content expertise, cross-training, and segregation of duties necessary to lower our members’ operative risk and maximize the collective wisdom of our network.

We boldy share resources with participating members so that they can benefit from the expertise and the deep bench the shared staff represents as well as the collective expertise that has been built up as a result of past experience and lessons learned by other members

This courageous collaboration allows our members to enhance their expertise around the areas of behavioral health/medical/third party billing, client data, evaluation, facilities, human resources, finance and IT while not losing focus on what matters most—their mission.

Incubating Promising Ideas

We facilitate spaces for members to foster powerful relationships. These communities of practice encourage members to share best practices and develop collaborative strategies with real potential for collective impact.

Together, our members recognize that by courageously collaborating around these ideas, they can create greater equity for the communities they serve.

Launching Collaborative Connections

We are stronger together. Since 2013, we’ve created powerful initiatives focused around collaborative fundraising and contracting, along with technical assistance and support for emerging collaborative projects.

This collaborative approach among members has allowed us to launch innovative programming that helps our member organizations achieve their mission. Some examples include Seamless Connections, a pilot project aimed at connecting food shelf recipients with employment, the Be @ School Truancy Collaborative, a project to increase school attendance across Hennepin County and Healthy Eating Healthy Minds, which is a collaboration among early childhood education and childcare organizations to ensure young children in the inner city have an equal opportunity to be healthy and kindergarten ready.

These collaborative connections are just the beginning. With our infrastructure, committed membership, and intermediary capabilities, we help members develop courageous collaborative approaches to their work.